Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) is a platform-independent, XML-based registry. UDDI is an open industry initiative, which enables companies to publish service listings and define how the services or software applications interact over the Internet. The ultimate goal of UDDI is to streamline online transactions by enabling companies to find one another on the Web and make their systems interoperable for e-commerce.
The UDDI registry service manages information about service providers, service implementations, and service metadata. For example, service providers can use UDDI to advertise their services and service consumers can use UDDI to discover services that suit their requirements and to obtain the service metadata needed to consume those services. Thus, the UDDI depends on the service provider to register its services on the registry.
Currently, many companies maintain a registry such as, for example, International Business Machines, Corp. (IBM). (IBM is a trademark of International Business Machines, Corp. in the United States, other countries, or both.) The IBM registry, for example, is a registry server that is interoperable with servers from other members. In this manner, as information goes into the registry server, servers in other companies or members can share the information.
A UDDI registration typically consists of three components:                White Pages: address, contact, and known identifiers;        Yellow Pages: industrial categorizations based on standard taxonomies; and        Green Pages: technical information about services exposed by the business. UDDI registration is open to companies worldwide.        
The UDDI specification utilizes World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards such as XML, HTTP, and Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. It has also adopted Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messaging guidelines for cross platform programming. For example, the UDDI is designed to be interrogated by, for example, SOAP messages and to provide access to Web Services Description Language documents describing the protocol bindings and message formats required to interact with the web services listed in its directory.
In operation, the UDDI is not a service running on the consumer's machine; instead, the service is running on the Internet. To gain access to the UDDI, the user accesses the UDDI registry via a public address. Once the user gains access to the UDDI, it requests certain services, at which time the UDDI searches its database for such services. The UDDI will then return a list of possible services. In this way, the UDDI relies on the user to proactively determine its service requirements and request such services from the UDDI. This is time consuming and relies very heavily on the user knowing its specific needs.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.